The Best Corporate Citizens

Which companies topped CRO's list?

It's that time of year: the folks at CRO magazine (formerly known as Business Ethics magazine) have just released their list of 2007's 100 best corporate citizens. This should be of particular interest to those among us who like to invest in socially responsible ways. (CRO, by the way, stands for corporate responsibility officer.)

Here are the top seven companies on the list:

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters(NASDAQ:GMCR)

Advanced Micro Devices(NYSE:AMD)

Nike(NYSE:NKE)

Motorola(NYSE:MOT)

Intel(NASDAQ:INTC)

IBM(NYSE:IBM)

Agilent Technologies(NYSE:A)

There are several interesting things to note here. For starters, remember when Nike was in the news a lot about its abusive "sweatshop" production facilities overseas? Well, its rating for "human rights" is still a modest 0.409, but the company has made progress. CRO notes that Nike "is a leader among apparel companies pushing for improvements throughout its supply chain."

Another thing to note is that the overall scores are based on marks in several categories, such as community, corporate governance, diversity, environment, and so on. So while Green Mountain Coffee Roasters nabbed the No. 1 spot, it still rated just a 0.909 on diversity (versus nearly 4.0 on community and corporate governance). This just drives home a point I've made before: that there are so many ways of looking at social responsibility among companies that it's hard to find any company not falling short in some areas.

If you'd like to learn more about socially responsible investing, take a look at these articles:

Author

Selena Maranjian has been writing for the Fool since 1996 and covers basic investing and personal finance topics. She also prepares the Fool's syndicated newspaper column and has written or co-written a number of Fool books. For more financial and non-financial fare (as well as silly things), follow her on Twitter... Follow @SelenaMaranjian